Take ownership of your information
Google Analytics is the most used tool to track websites, currently monitoring 56% of all websites. It is not hard to see why: it is user-friendly, concise, quick, and most importantly it’s free. The latter should raise your suspicion because if you aren’t paying by cash, you are probably paying with something else. In this case, you are paying Google with something more valuable than money: your information. The data you collect through Google Analytics belongs to Google, not to you. They aggregate the data and allow you to see the aggregates from different perspectives, but they do not provide access to the actual individual data records. This article accentuates the benefits, limits, and alternatives of digital data collection.
Stop operating in the dark!
First of all, Google Analytics is not web analytics, it is a reporting tool. They show facts such as the number of visitors, the most popular pages, time on site, etc.
Because you don’t see the granular data of individual visitors, there is no way to actually analyze this information. If on average per session 5 pages have been viewed, this can either mean you engaged visitors for 5 pages on average or they couldn’t find what they were looking for and their patience ran out after approximately 5 pages. If your average session duration is 2 minutes, you wouldn’t know whether most visitors stayed for 2 minutes, or only one visitor stayed a very long time and most visitors left within seconds. Because you don’t know the variation behind the aggregates and can’t further examine individual visitors, you are only scraping the surface.
GDPR
Secondly, collecting data you can’t access is concerning with regard to the GDPR. Using the IP-anonymization functionality does not prevent the collection of personal data through the URL. The URL can still capture the email address of visitors that subscribe to the newsletter. The unlawful processing of data is troublesome enough, but being in your control of the data is the first step to control the damage.
Alternatives
So there are abundant reasons why you should not use Google Analytics, but what are your alternatives? There are various tools that simply facilitate data collection and reporting whilst allowing you access to the individual records, e.g. Clicky, CrazyEgg and Piwik (a.k.a. Matomo). This allows you to properly analyze and interpret your data and to join it with your other data sources, e.g. CRM or campaign data. You can create your own custom dimensions and metrics and make data-driven decisions. Sure, you have to pay with money instead of data, but this is cheaper in the long run.
Actionable Insights
For instance, at digital agency Burst, we used Piwik to make the digital operations of a large pharmaceutical client data-driven. By installing Piwik on their various medical websites, individual visitors — medical specialists — could be tracked. A custom dimension was configured to determine the specialism of the visitor. This allowed the pharmaceutical client to examine how their content resonated with their target audience and estimate the adoption status of their medicines with various specialists. One of the insights we found was that certain content was very effective to spark the interest of specialist with low adoption status. The client used this content as the landing page for their next campaign to increase the adoption status of their medicine.
Become data-driven
In summary, Google provides an appealing offer, as they present your web metrics for free in a confusing set of reports. However, the price of forfeiting your data is steep. You incur opportunity costs of the insights you might have gotten by analyzing the data. Stop making your business decisions on gut feeling, and start making better data-driven decisions. Your first step? Forget Google Analytics and take the ownership of your data!
